‘My Mother, My Gangster’: Arundhati Roy Confronts Her Fiercest Subject
The Booker Prize-winning author turns inward with Mother Mary Comes to Me, a searing memoir of love and defiance.
Photo illustration by Jordan Bohannon; Photo: Mayank Austen Soofi
Long before she became a Booker Prize-winning novelist and international icon, Arundhati Roy was a teenager who refused to come home.
Rejecting the walled miseries of her divorced mother’s volatile household, she often retreated to the banks of the open river where she grew up in southern India. When Roy left the state of Kerala for New Delhi to study in the 1970s, she vowed never to return, cutting off contact with her mother, Mary Roy, for years. That same river — and the fraught emotional landscape — would resurface as fiction in her acclaimed debut novel, The God of Small Things.